Hotlanta

One of my first stops on this new adventure turned out to be Atlanta.  It was my first ever trip to the state of Georgia, although I got very close on the Miami road trip.  I must say it was nice going from the 50 degree temperatures of Seattle to the 80 degree temperatures there.  Of course, it wasn't all perfect... a couple of weather "events" moved through Atlanta while I was there.  One was bad enough that there was a tornado watch for most of the evening.  The worst only lasted about 30 minutes where I was but the sky turned very dark, the winds swirled, there was thunder and lightning, then heavy rain and hail, all of which combined to knock out the power at my hotel for about an hour (it took down the hotel's Internet access for most of the week).  Most of the time it was really nice and warm, though.

The bad storm was fortuitous for one reason.  It caused the Braves game that was scheduled for that Friday to be postponed until Saturday and I had already purchased tickets for the Saturday game which, of course, meant my first ever doubleheader!  Turner Field is very nice, like most of the new era ballparks, but unlike the others they have a Hall of Fame museum that is truly worthy given their unparalleled success over the past two decades.  In there I got to see the 1995 World Series trophy that should have belonged to the Mariners ;)

 

The games were pretty good but about half of the fans left after the first game.  The Braves won both, the first on four solo home runs (two by Alex Gonzales) and the second was a 2-hit shutout.  The Mets looked pretty sorry, having sort of the opposite problem that the Mariners have—decent offense, poor pitching.

Before the games I visited a few of the tourist attractions downtown.  The World of Coca-Cola is basically a museum of the history of Coke.  It was pretty cool although I had seen the mobile version in Vancouver at the 2010 Winter Olympics.  The strangest part was at the end where you go through an area with soda fountains dispensing 64 different flavors of Coke from all around the world.  There were kids running around everywhere, obviously on a sugar high, and about every three minutes one of them would vomit all of the stuff they had been drinking... my black Reeboks had a near miss before I got the heck out of there.  I also went to the Georgia Aquarium which was nearby.  If you've seen one aquarium, you've kind of seen them all but they had a few exhibits I thought were pretty cool—a glass tunnel under one tank allowed you to see huge whale sharks swim overhead, the best seahorse exhibit I think I've ever seen, a crazy looking thing called a Weedy Sea Dragon that I'd never heard of before, and the Giant Japanese Spider Crabs were impressive, too.  After the aquarium I walked over to Centennial Olympic Park which was featured at the 1996 Summer Olympics.